- ;.',- , ... -,. I 11 \' - ; rm. I}I\\ \, . · 0 . "t\ · .,. ".. THE TALI( OF THE TOWN lVotes and Comment I N the press and on the television news programs, the last couple of months have unexpectedly turned out to be a season of spectacular crime. The first episode in this highly publi- cized crime wave was, perhaps, the dis- appearance of Jimmy Hoffa. The next was the kidnapping of Samuel Bronf- man II, whose face was soon stanng out at the nation from the cover of N p7.vsweek. Then came the first appar- ent attempt on the life of President F'ord, by Lynette Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson "family," and her face was seen on the covers of both ]'i-rne and Newsweek. It was at this point that a certifiable trend-a wave of occurrences governed to some extent by the laws of fashion-became evi- dent. The element of crime-as-fashion mayor may not have been present In the thoughts of the criminals, who, we are told, thrive on the publicity their crimes get, but that element was un- questionably present in the news cover- age of the crimes. Two weeks later, when Patricia Hearst was captured by the F.B.I., all restraint broke down. Again, an accused cnminal was on the covers of T'lme and Newsweek, and this time Newsweek gave the story a nineteen-page spread, including seven pages of photographs and, strange to say, a painting of Patricia Hearst with raised clenched fist. Television news programs got out old bank-monitor photogr lphs of one of her alleged critnes s the San Francisco bank rob- bery, and the T'lmes gave the story of the capture a four-column headline. The week after that, the second appar- ent attempt was made on the President's life, this one by a left-wing activist and F.B.I. informer, Sara Moore, who in her official capacity had had peripheral involvement in the Hearst case, and who in discussing her reasons for shoot- ing at the President mentioned the strong impact on her of the Patricia Heîrst story. By this time, it appeared that an alliance of terrorists hungry for publicity, of news organizations seeking to expand their audiences, and of read- ers and viewers eager to learn about violent and sensational events had coa- lesced into an informal system not very different from a Roman circus-a sys- tem in which the terrorists were the gladiators, and the whole wired-up, tuned-in nation was the arena. Meanw hile, news of assaSSIns of an- other kind was emerging. These assas- sins-the kind who, instead of shoot- ing people in the government, shoot people for the government-did not thrive on publicity. Far from It; the television and press coverage they were receiving, in connection with the con- gressional C.I.A. hearings, was the very last thing they wanted. These as sassins, whose world was every bit as weird and frightening as that of Charles Manson or that of the Svm- bionese Liberation Army, did not need television coverage, authors' lecture tours, or large advances from book publishers in order to feel that they and their crimes had won respectability; they were already en joying the feeling of respectability which comes from working for the government on proj- ects of national security. In any event, murder of every sort, even as it was universally deplored, was gaining in re- spectability. An atmosphere of assassi- nation had spread across the country, and in that atmosphere distinctions were blurring and disappearing-dis- tinctions between fame and notoriety, o I a, } , I ... ... c J ,... -- "." I .,.,. , ",;: '=- \ J.J.\ . . .. l - .., u.. -{ between entertainment and tragedy, between law enforcement and crimi- nality. Things that should be kept strictly apart were merging. The gov- ernment, by apparently undertaking to carry out assassinations, had placed it- self on a ] eve] with the assdssins who had thinned the ranks of American leadership in recent years, and who even now were aiming their guns at the President. Every pOlson dart that the government may have fired, every poison cigar it may have handed out, every poison light bulb it may have screwed into a socket was an invita- tion to a1] the lunatics in the world to make attempts on the President's Jife. A would-he assassin turned out to be associated with the F.B.I. The C.I.A. was revealed to be in league with the Mafia. The S.L.A.'s symbol, a seven- headed cobra, was turning out to be appropnate for the C.I.A., too, be- cause the C.I.A. had found a use for cobra venom and had been collecting the stuff. The C.I.A., the S.L.A., the F.B.I., and Charles Manson's family were Iningling on our television screens, in our thoughts, and, it seelned, in the real world, and it was getting harder by the minute to tell them apart. . . Vestmaker N O one seems to know exactly how many full-tÎtne vestmakers there ale in New York CIty these days, but Chauncey Hunter, executive secretary of the Custom Tailors & Designers Association of America, and a man in a position to make a guess, puts the num- ber at about a dozen. "Bergdorf Good- man, Bon wit Teller, and Saks Fifth A venue certainly don't have any vest- I makers, because they've closed their custom-tailoring departments," Mr. Hunter told us when we called him to ask where we might find one of the city's remaining vestmakers "Chipp and J. Press have none here, because their custom departments are in New Haven. Brooks Brothers has a couple